Getting Idempotent with It
If you were casually reading along up to this point, this is a heads-up that what we’re about to say is possibly the most important topic when working with microservices. We’re going to talk about idempotence.
The word “idempotence” literally means “same power,”[37] and the idea is that if a function is idempotent, there are only two states that matter—it having been called zero times, and it having been called one or more times. Additional calls have no additional side effects.
This is as important to microservices as oxygen is to you, dear reader. Messaging. Systems. Fail. You will see the same message more than once, and it is physically impossible to guarantee exactly-once delivery. As software developers, we build ...
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